Film festivals run year-round across the world and range in size, fame, themes, and so on. But no matter what, they all have a common purpose: each is an event that gives filmmakers a chance to showcase their work and drum up interest for a project, while giving film enthusiasts a chance to see a movie before it’s mainstream, or simply see artsier fare than usual. Often, it’s also a chance to meet with the people behind the film.

For instance, at the Minneapolis St. Paul International Film Festival (MSPIFF), held recently in the Twin Cities, the core duo behind one festival offering, Smitten! –  quirky romantic comedy that although wasn’t one of the splashiest films going into the festival, became a fan-favorite, selling out its screenings and generating buzz afterward – attended the screenings for audience Q&As.

The duo, producer Julia Rask and writer-director Barry Morrow, both happen to be Minnesota natives and are regarded as hometown stars, but their credentials go well beyond the Midwest. Morrow wrote Rain Man, the 1988 Oscar winner for Best Picture, among other successful projects, and Rask’s roles have included producer on the late 90s show Early Edition and a producer on The Mindy Project.

Their collaborative effort Smitten! is an English-language film and stars Glee actor Darren Criss, but otherwise features mostly European actors and was shot in Alto Adige, a small area in Italy’s Sud Tyrol mountain region.

It follows the story of what happens when three crime boss henchmen, and the American businessman’s son whom they kidnap, are forced to stay in a cursed barn in a remote Italian village. The curse causes each to fall in love with the first living thing they see in the morning, and shenanigans ensue.

Morrow says the idea for the film came from a real-life obituary he read, about a woman whose experience with a small village left a lasting impact on the villagers’ attitudes and superstitions about love. The woman’s story didn’t end well and Morrow views Smitten! as a way, however limited, to change that and fulfill the woman’s dying wish.

The film also fulfilled a wish Morrow and his partners had had for a while: to film something in Italy. Morrow said another producing partner, David Nichols, always sent him news stories from Italy to inspire him, and Rask pushed for them to combine their talents and resources – including property Nichols owns in Italy – to do a project. Ultimately, it was that woman’s story that moved Morrow.

Rask and Morrow spoke to TheCelebrityCafe.com over the phone a week after the festival about making the movie happen. They also shared industry insight and plans for the future, among other juicy tidbits.

Here’s what they had to say:

Motives and getting things going

TheCelebrityCafe: This is your first time directing, Barry, correct?

Barry Morrow: Yes. I mean I’m not counting, nor do I even list, early documentaries I made when I was in Minneapolis, in my 20s just learning.

Julia Rask: He’s been slated to direct other films he’s written, [but when] you’re in the studio system, sometimes it doesn’t work out for various reasons and he’s always been so gracious when that happens, but at the same time, he’s waited a long time for this opportunity.

 TCC: I get the sense that independent films are most often heavy in tone, slow-burning. Smitten is very different from that – and from your previous work. Would you agree, and if so, what made you want to go that unusual route?

BM: I think people make a film with commercial goals in mind and we’ve been told by distributors and others that it’s easy to sell… something dark and gruesome, and that would’ve never occurred to us. I’d done serious dramas all my life… so I think for me, it was an opportunity… to try something really very different from my body of work.

And also, I’m at an age where I’ve learned a few lessons about life, and one of them is we all hunger for the same thing, which is to be wanted, to be loved. And that’s an underlying theme of Rain Man, the underlying theme of Bill, the underlying theme of The Karen Carpenter Story – all the things I’ve been successful with have that at the heart of it, so why not turn it upside down and tell that same lesson through smiles and laughs rather than tears? It’s as simple as that… it was just a chance for me to show another side of my talent, if indeed there is one.

JR: And I think your assessment of indie films is correct because we – it has gone back in the last two years, it has gone back to more edgier fare. We got dinged both ways, for having a movie that was… too much of a studio movie because it was light and airy and a fable, as opposed to in the last few years, everything has gone back to, whatever the last greatest hit was – Whiplash – everybody wanted something edgy, dark like that so it just, it’s cyclical. So, you never know, you just gotta do the best, you gotta be proud of what you’re doing and do the best job you can.

TCC: Julia, what did you think of the story when Barry told you about it?

JR: I always assumed we’d be going to Tuscany, so when Barry came up with this lovely little fable – I learned long ago… to just go along with the writer and see what they create and this took us, like it’s gonna be 25 years from the idea to really making it happen and I think Barry would also say it just, it wouldn’t go out of our heads, we just kept coming back to it. Right [Barry]?

BM: Absolutely and you know, we have other projects like that, too. People think you make a movie and then it’s all somehow done within a compact period of time. A lot of these things need a long gestation period, for different reasons. Maybe the idea isn’t timely, but it’s more likely that it’s a matter of financing, packaging the talent, and all those things can seem to be just within your grasp and they aren’t, and so you wait or you put it aside and you go on to other projects, but you won’t – the stars have to align, and finally they did in a nice way.

JR: Part of it is too… [Barry’s] got wonderful kids and grandkids and when you go off to direct a movie, it takes you out of your life for years. You get [just] little snippets of seeing people, especially when you’re working in a foreign country, and I don’t think he wanted to give up that time with his family any younger.

TCC: So, after you had the idea and set to work, how long did the process take of bringing it to fruition?

JR: ...Barry and his wife were going on an Italian cruise and I said ‘you’ve gotta… get this script written by the time you take that cruise,’ and that really was the impetus for him to complete it. But from that time to when we shot the movie was only about a year, which was incredible, and then we shot it in 30 days, but I would say we were really down to business for 3-4 years, raising the money, and once we really committed and got a little bit of seed money to get started, I think it was about… 4 years.

BM: And back in the day when we first had the idea, we did go around to some production companies and studios just to see if we could get traction and we couldn’t. They didn’t want a little movie like this, it just didn’t fit into anybody’s wish list except ours. Rain Man, which is, this will be its 30^th anniversary this year coming up, is a movie that was barely able to be made at the studios back in the late 80s and now, as you know, I couldn’t sell Rain Man to a studio. It would be an independent film. So, we got smart and said, “well, let’s try and go outside of the studio system and put this thing together with other resources.” So where to start? With our friends, basically...

JR: It became clear that nobody was going to do this in the traditional studio sense, so we then had to refigure all of our ideas and also learn a whole heck of a lot… it was like reinventing ourselves in a certain sense because we’d been studio and network people for our entire careers pretty much.

BM: Spoiled by it, too.

JR: Yeah and all the protections you have… I did a show at the Guthrie [Theatre, in Minneapolis] where we had to raise the money and go in and do it, and I did my own little short film years ago – I’d always gone to the same core group of people who knew me as a kid and these people, the same ones who gave me 2,000 dollars in 1986, or $1,000 or 100, some of those people gave us $10,000 to get us started – because the riskiest money in any film is the development cost before you get it made. Once you’re shooting a film, you’ve got an asset. When you just have a script you’re never sure that that’s ever gonna come to fruition, so these people had to use blind faith and the fact that they knew Barry and I very well.

Barry also went to some of his close friends – these were people completely out of the business and we had to sell them in a very different way for the experiences of, ‘hey come along and be involved in a film and guess what, we’re shooting it in Italy.’ One of the families, their daughter is looking to go into the business and she came to the mix with us, she learned some of the post-production elements, so it was really opening a window into our world for some people who otherwise wouldn’t be coming in, so it was really a great mix of people.

A star to lead the way

TCC: I’m surprised your studio connections weren’t enough to get it made that way – would it have mattered if you had had an all-American cast or setting?

JR: Like if Chris Pratt decided he wanted to do… and we did it, but it wouldn’t have been true to Barry’s original vision of literally two Americans and all the rest Italians, or at the very least, Europeans. That also, though, presents real challenges for us as producers because the movie is on the back of really Darren Criss, so you have to find the right actor who’s up for the challenge of saying alright, “I’ll go to Italy, not knowing any of the supporting cast, and I’ll trust you, Barry, to show me the way,” because that is a huge risk that many, many actors won’t take, so kudos to Darren for that.

TCC: What was it like working with Darren?

BM: Darren is a consummate pro… so multitalented. He sings, he plays music, he’s done Broadway, one-man performances, and he’s just as smart as a whip. I have to say he needed very little from me. On the occasion I’m watching the monitor and just see that he’s missing the heart of a scene or a line reading, all I had to do was go into the, wherever we were shooting, his eyes would meet mine and he’d say, “I know, I know,” and he’d come back and do it again. I didn’t even have to use words with Darren, he was that good. The Italians on the other hand, there was a lot of hand-holding – language was an obstacle, even more so than I knew… often I was pantomiming at least the physical parts and the expressions, and I didn’t expect them to mimic me but they would – we communicated differently, put it that way.

JR: Darren is a dream actor to work with. He was always up for the challenge... He was just up for anything, and he bonded with the cast and crew immediately. The other thing about Darren, and I don’t use the term lightly, he’s a bit of a musical savant. He plays about 12 instruments and we had a lot of music, as you saw in the film… We were always playing music when we had a few minutes of spare time. What was great is Dan Chouinard, our local Minnesotan accordion and musical impresario, was there (as a musical consultant) and the two of them would just get together and just watch what each other was doing and play all these songs and that was so much fun. Like I said, we could not have had a better experience with our cast. It was wonderful and Darren was the big leader.

*Criss also was fluent in Italian (he studied in Tuscany for some time) though Rask and Morrow didn’t know that when they first brought him on and didn’t incorporate it into the film.

TCC: How did you land Criss?

JR: One of the things he said in retrospect, is he knew from the first time he met us – and we met at like a very SoHo house in New York City because he was doing (the Broadway musical) “Hedwig (and the Angry Inch)” there. Barry and I just flew in for like literally a couple days to meet with him and woo him to come and do our little movie… and he said he knew from the moment he met us that we were good people and he was willing to take a journey with us. And he’s also got great – he grew up in San Francisco, but he went to college at Michigan and he’s got a lot of Midwestern sensibilities…

 Culture clashes

TCC: How important was it to you that the rest of the cast was Italians or Europeans?

BM: Well, we didn’t want to have an American movie that we simply shot in Italy with a bunch of familiar faces from TV or whatever, but to rather use the great character faces that are undeniably populating this whole picture – and their accents are charming. Sometimes their understandability did suffer, but we did our best in post-(production) to crispen the dialogue. But yeah, we wanted it to look and feel like an Italian movie, but obviously, it’s in English with American stars, so it’s a hybrid, I guess it is.

TCC: Did that combination lead to other culture clashes – beyond language barriers?

BM: I can give you a funny one… the fellow Fabrizio (Biggio) who played Cetto, who was in love with the cow, he said on set later that when he read – when we sent him the script and he read it, he loved it, it was so funny and charming, and then he gets to the end where it’s a big dance and the lead character Tyler, Darren’s character, is wearing the mask of an ass. He didn’t know that an ass was a donkey or mule, he just thought he was wearing a butt mask on his face.

JR: Yeah, two butt cheeks on his face. He didn’t get it.

BM: He just didn’t get that part of it at all, but in terms of – there are cultural tensions in northern Italy, historical because northern Italy where we shot was once part of Austria – largely German-speaking and Italian. We had to learn to walk a narrow path there between the cultures because we didn’t want to exclude anybody from feeling a part of this…

JR: …For the most part, people got along. But there is resentment because Mussolini just came in and annexed that part of Austria, so there is resentment by the Germanic people… our first assistant director Fabrizio Bava, he’s been up there skiing in the winter and he grew up vacationing up there and he’s shot up there, and he knew enough when we were searching for animals – because all of our animals for the movie were trained… in the six weeks before we started shooting – he knew enough that he shouldn’t go on the scouting for that, but he sent our location scout who’s fluent in German with the animal trainer who came from Munich to go to the local farmers to source the animals. And of course, they were brilliant, they loved it, they were speaking German, while the rest of us at our hotel, we really tried to speak German because, in respect for the people there. But we had a wonderful sign language going back and forth.

[We’re returning to the Alto Adige region on the 4^th of July], and in the biggest theatre in the valley, we’re going back to show Smitten! so we’re really – that’s the Fourth of July – and then the 7^th we’ll be in Rome, in the Campo de’ Fiori, which is the beautiful flower market, we’ll be screening it there. It’s going to be some idyllic screenings with our cast and crew and some press and Italian VIPs, so that will be a lot of fun.

The ups and downs of making the movie

TCC: What were other challenges you faced – or what was the hardest part about directing this film?

BM: Well I suppose just running out of energy every day, you know, 12-14 hour days, times 6 days a week, running up and down the mountain, running up and down our hotel stairs. I’m about as fit as a near-70-year-old can be as a result of it, so I’m not complaining, but it was hard. I don’t think Alfred Hitchcock was running up and down hills at my age.

JR: …there was very little sleep for all of us… on my end of it, I could be still talking and doing business with LA until like 4 am in Italy, so there were many of those nights, because we had none of the infrastructures that all the studios have, like for script clearance and accounting departments and things like that, all the legal, so we had to do that ourselves. So, it was a grind but at the same time, we knew having it taking this long to get it to come to fruition that we had to embrace every moment and just really try to enjoy ourselves as much as possible.

BM: Just one other thing in terms of challenge, we filmed in the valley, as you could see by the aerial shots, and surrounded by mountains. That meant daylight started later. The sun has to come up over that mountain and then it goes down early. We had frequent, almost daily thundershowers or rain showers… our locations were limited to 38 wooden buildings, but only about a fourth of which were habitable, so finding the locations for scenes, being able to shoot under the weather conditions and lighting conditions, all of that poses problems for the most experienced producing and directing team, so we were up to our necks in it but as Jules said, we always found a way to celebrate what we were doing, and believe me the Italian cast and crew were right there with us.

JR: …again this took 25 years to do, you’ve gotta love something to want to keep coming back to it that much. We knew going in it’s the journey often along the way that’s the most joyous as opposed to waiting to see what happens at the end because in this business, if you’re waiting for the awards and the box office at the end, you’re going to be waiting a long time, most people, but we really embraced it and had an amazing and a wonderful time, it was incredible. We will take these memories to the home—because it was truly a once in a lifetime experience.

Smitten! debuts, audiences swoon

CC: The film seemed to be really well-received at the festival. How does that feel?

BM: It feels like we stacked the deck because — a lot of people came because they knew us. We’re hometown kids, so we know that, but we’re hoping that it will play to the same sensibility regardless of the venue. Also, we know that this is not on anybody’s must-see list, until they get bored of the other fare. Like what happened with My Big Fat Greek Wedding. It just came at a time when people were looking for an alternative to what was being presented. We feel that Smitten! too will be what is called an evergreen film, there’s nothing to date it really… So, our hope is it will have legs and it will last for a long time. It won’t perhaps make a big, big splash but I think the ripples will go on for a long, long time. That’s my hope.

TCC: Why do you think it resonated so well with people?

JR: I think part of it is it harkens back to a gentler time and a lot of the people I spoke to – we went out to dinner, the reaction of my friend’s daughter [she’s a college graduate, she’s about 23] was just the greatest thing ever because we, who knows if you’re gonna have the millennials and she just… loved it because she said well, first of all, I’m a fan of fairy tales and she just talked so beautifully about it and she totally got the whole thing and she just went with it. If people try to think too seriously about it, it maybe doesn’t work as well, but if you just go with it and you’re inside this special world, people really love it. And we’ve screened it for kids as young as seven [and as old as 101].

TCC: When you have such a good audience reaction – let’s say you get that feedback at future screenings – do you go back to studios and say, “look, people are liking it”?

JR: You just have to see what happens. There’s no going back, there’s only going forward, so you know this one, we’re excited about what [the production company they recently landed a deal with] Film Movement’s going to do, also the fact that it is the 30^th anniversary of Rain Man, and also to have Barry, who’s nearing his, well in his seventh decade I guess, so, to have that is a story in itself.

And now we can start telling some of these tales, but the independent film is hard to find distribution, so it took us a while getting here… and it just takes that time to find distribution if you don’t have it in the beginning.

BM: I can tell you one place we won’t be showing it. That’s in China. It was banned in China. Not really banned, but I had connections right up to the top of the Chinese film industry because I’ve been a frequent visitor to China and done some charity work there over the years, and so we sent the film and they rejected it based on the homosexual element of it. We took such pains to make that as family friendly as it could be, not trying to sidestep the issue by any means, but just to take any “discomfort” out, because everybody’s love affair is silly, so we thought that would be a nice protection for the Chinese to see this and we were not successful unfortunately. We spent a good deal of money getting the film translated and with subtitles and all of that...

JR: We could have no gay characters. And the other thing, too, that’s happened, and we’re speaking for China and a little bit of the world, is since our conservative movement in this country happened, it’s carried over to China because they just tightened the restrictions… it just hit at the wrong time. And that was because the conservatives are more in control. So, we’ll see what happens next year after the election.

Looking back and words of wisdom

*Morrow’s earliest success was a made-for-tv, Emmy-winning film Bill, about Morrow’s own real-life friendship with a man who was institutionalized for 44 years and had no family or other friends in his life. After Bill passed away, Morrow would attend charity events in his memory. It was at such an event in Texas where he met Kim Peek, the real-life mega-savant on whom Rain Man was based.

TCC: How does it feel to have your first huge writing project, Rain Man, win an Oscar and be so successful?

BM: Well I’d won an Emmy first – that was probably even bigger in a way because that meant I actually had a profession… Up until then, I literally on my tax returns, even though I was making some small amounts writing, I always wrote under “occupation”: ‘typist’ rather than “writer,” because it just didn’t feel real, so winning an Emmy, then I was able to write “screenwriter” or whatever, and then of course 8 or 9 years later when lightning struck again with Rain Man.

It feels exactly like what you imagine it would, extremely satisfying but it’s fate, too. I mean, you can’t keep looking back at your glory days, whether you were the high school quarterback or you win an Oscar. You gotta get up every day with a new idea and see if you can do it again.

TCC: What other advice do you have for people interested in breaking into the business?

BM: First of all, you can write a great script from anywhere on the planet. You no longer have to go to Hollywood and get a waiter or waitress job to support being there, but eventually, you gotta make the trek out here and do what young people do, connect, network… But there’s no one-two-three program for success in Hollywood. Everyone I know came in through the back window or door left open, no one gets in through the front gate. There’s just too many guards, too many layers of bureaucracy and too many people who want that same break. So, you’ve got to make it happen, I can’t say what that is. If I knew, I would sell it on the Internet and be the richest man around.

It takes certainly stick-to-it-iveness. It takes a certain kind, can’t be much of a shrinking vile and expect people to do the work for you, but really if you write a great script you can hide it under your bed because people will sniff it out. A great script is really such a rare thing that it will get made. A good script or mediocre script, that one’s gonna be tough and I’ve got no advice for somebody other than do your very best work and don’t quit.

JR: On the producing side, it’s very much the same, it’s finding that way to… coming out here and finding one person, getting in a class that helps you meet people… I was introduced to Barry – we went to the same high school – through my theatrical mentor, so I was very lucky and I just kept at it.

Because what often happens is people come to me for advice, and then they fall away, maybe for whatever reason. The good ones, I’ll say, “make sure you keep in touch” and it’s interesting, the good ones will keep in touch and they will eventually get jobs and there’s a lot of people who fall by the wayside. Because there’s a lot of people who come out here and they want to be a director and it’s kind of finding also what your niche is to break in and then try to make your dreams come true.

BM: There’s another way to do it, and since Stephen Soderberg has now made a film on an iPhone, if you’ve got an iPhone, you’re a filmmaker too now, so there’s that. You make a film with your friends and your home in your world with your vision, a short, probably, and you can be in festivals, and again, it’s just another way to catch hold of the fringes of the business.

JR: And that didn’t exist a few many years ago, so that’s the advice I give people, is go make something. And that’s the advice Barry gave to me, he said you know go, you’ll get your whole grad school experience by making a short film and that certainly was true…

Looking ahead and last words on Smitten!

TCC: What’s next for you both after this film?

JR: I would say for one thing we are working together on a feature film project… but in the meantime, I’m hoping to go on to a half-hour comedy series at NBC called I Feel Bad… And then at the same time, we’re developing new projects.

BM: I’ve been working on a documentary about an acquired savant syndrome person who is fascinating in their own right and that will be finished sometime probably next year. And I’m just beginning a new writing assignment, independent film. We haven’t locked in a name yet for it. And then after that Jules and I will team again on this new feature film, which hopefully will be a studio movie because it really requires free, great actors and name actors.

JR: And it’s not a studio in the traditional sense. It’ll be what we call a mini-major – companies that work independently but finance… we’re not gonna do what we did on Smitten!  because this should, this is back in Barry’s area and wheelhouse and we’re going to be looking for a big director and big names to bring it to fruition.

TCC: With your Rain Man success, and the response so far to Smitten!, do you usually know when something’s going to be a hit?

BM: You’re not supposed to as a writer, you’re supposed to just keep your head down and never really do that. But I do remember I was halfway writing through Rain Man and – actually lightning struck a phone pole behind our house, came down through the modem, which was only like a week old, and blew out my computer, so I had to start Rain Man from scratch and who knows, maybe the first one wasn’t as good as the second or maybe the first one was brilliant and we’ll never know. But in any case, once I started again, I told my wife “I don’t know what I mean by this but I think this could go all the way.” And she said, “well, what’s all the way?” And I said, “I don’t even know, I just have a feeling.”

That was gonna be, if it ever got made, it was gonna need two big Hollywood stars and it got them. You can’t get bigger than Tom Cruise and Dustin Hoffman. We knew we didn’t have that going into Smitten! so our expectations are certainly tempered by that, but like I said, I think Smitten! could just keep gathering moss.

JR: And then some.

BM: That’s my hope… I just don’t do a movie and leave it behind. I do a movie and pack it in my suitcase and carry it forward. I’m hoping that Smitten! will keep rolling. It will give you a smile, I will guarantee that, that’s all I’m saying to people…

JR: You’ll leave the theater smiling, yeah. And we hope Darren’s fans will find it, as well... we feel this is perfect timing for this to come out, it’s a little escape. It’s a wonderful souffle of comedy and an escape.

TCC: What’s Smitten! mean to you?

JR: I loved what the Italians said... because they didn’t know what “smitten” meant because that’s a very English term, but they decided that the movie should come out in Italy called “Colpito da fulmine” which means “struck by lightning” because that’s really what it is. It’s like your heart is struck by lightning, you’re smitten.

BM: Personally, it’s simply a description of what happened to me when I was 16 years old and sitting in front of a 15-year-old, about to turn 16-year-old girl with long, dark hair, who I married, and we still are, and I can see she’s outside gardening now and her hair’s white. Other than that, she’s just as beautiful and I was smitten, so I figured – everything is somewhat autobiographical and the way that I had to chase her around is not that different than the movie and I’ve always been surrounded by my gang of idiot friends…

The other thing is smitten, the idea that love is an instantaneous thing may be a stretch but love certainly is the thing that holds the world together, and we’re living always now under very uncertain times and I wanted to remind audiences, as I need to remind myself, that what the Beatles said is right: love is all there is.

Smitten! is expected to hit digital platforms this fall through Film Movement, with possible limited theatrical releases. To follow the film, go to www.smitten-film.com.